Ecofacts: Forests for the Trees – Save our Trees!

Another inspiring post from Barbara Hirsch! Rooftop gardens in NY City are helping to cool their buildings – trees do the same for our neighborhoods, cities, planet…

All land species require them in some way or other, and millions of plants and animals are going extinct as we clear away their homes. A world without trees would not be a human friendly place. An extensive report befitting the scope of the subject was just published in Nature, giving the best findings yet on the global tree population, calculated by a combination of satellite and ground based field work.

The current count of trees is over 3 trillion, far more than previous estimates. However, the planet has lost close to half the number of trees that existed before deforestation began in relatively recent history.

Less than half of forests are tropical and subtropical. But more than half of the loss has been among them.

How many trees per person? Russia and Canada’s boreal forests contain several thousand trees per person in their countries; Brazil has 1494; U.S. has 716; China has 102; India, a mere 28!!